Have the exact same thing, AE has been running fine on my machine with Yosemite. Did an OS X upgrade to Sierra on a new SSD and kept the Yosemite disk in tact. RAM preview does well the first second, then starts to slow down and is not catching up with the comps frame rate.

Really bad. After Effects used to be really smooth but a year or 2 ago the audio preview was terrible. They finally fixed it 2 years later. Now it's broken again with Sierra. They have had ages to test this. Come on!

This update is 14.0.1 and should be a bug fix for this and several other disturbing issues - especially for Mac users. It does not fix all the bugs that are new with the CC 2017 release (Known issues in After Effects CC 2017), but it does fix some issues that have been plaguing After Effects since the first parts of the new architecture showed up in the CC 2015 release.

If you can't see the update yet, you may need to wait a while until you see it as it can take up to 24 hours to populate an update across all the data centers. You may need to log out, relaunch the Creative Cloud app, and log in again.

This is still an issue for me. I'm running the latest After Effects 14.0.1.5 on mac os sierra 10.12.1 and it's nearly impossible to get real time preview playback. Even proxy files (Apple Prores 422 (proxy) 960*540) won't playback in real time and lead to high cpu load. I'm working on a current macbook pro (amd 370x, 16Gb memory) and with a thunderbolt 4-bay Raid-5 setup. It's nearly impossible for me to work like this.

This is still an issue for me. I'm running the latest After Effects 14.0.1.5 on mac os sierra 10.12.1 and it's nearly impossible to get real time preview playback. Even proxy files (Apple Prores 422 (proxy) 960*540) won't playback in real time and lead to high cpu load. I'm working on a current macbook pro (amd 370x, 16Gb memory) and with a thunderbolt 4-bay Raid-5 setup. It's nearly impossible for me to work like this.

What happens if you move a file to your local hard drive vs. doing it via the Thunderbolt connection?

Are you talking about initial playback or after a preview has been cached?

I did the same thing with a file on my local drive and it doesn't make a difference (internal ssd speeds are ~ 600MB/s, thunderbold Raid is 400MB/s) .

I'm talking about initial playback, with no effect, filter or anything else applied. Just dropping a video file into a 1080p comp. On another interesting note, I checked weather using the proxy files would increase caching speeds, but it didn't. "Rendering" a 5 seconds preview of a 4k file took 24 seconds, rendering the preview with its proxy (960*540) took exactly 24 sec as well. This is very strange, am I missing something?

I'm talking about initial playback, with no effect, filter or anything else applied. Just dropping a video file into a 1080p comp.

After Effects is not built for immediate, real-time playback. In general, it is expected that a preview is cached first before one should expect playback to be in real time. That being said, the CC 2017 version is supposed to be able to play back a video without effects in real time without caching the preview first (in many cases). I'd recommend unchecking the "use hardware to accelerate panels" option in your preferences and see if it helps.

obauma wrote:

On another interesting note, I checked weather using the proxy files would increase caching speeds, but it didn't. "Rendering" a 5 seconds preview of a 4k file took 24 seconds, rendering the preview with its proxy (960*540) took exactly 24 sec as well. This is very strange, am I missing something?

Without effects, I could see it being pretty similar. Try putting some non-gpu-accelerated effects on both clips and see if that makes a difference.

That's a good point. I'm working with 3d transformations, but rendering was always done with classic 3d.

After the reinstall the resolution downscaling to half or quarter is finally working. Scaling down to a third of the resoltion lets me preview my comp in realtime! Before, selection the option would reduce image quality but not accelerate the preview!

All is well, but very weird bug and probably unrelated to what was fixed with the patch.